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Ed. note: This post was originally published on July 28, 2017. In honor of this week’s bar-exam takers, we have republished it in relevant part.
“Far as draft picks, my name did not get called / Bet before I go I put a billion on the board.” — Jay Z
You just sat and took the bar exam this week. Now the grueling few months of waiting begins. I recently sat in your chair and walked in your shoes. Yesterday, a friend texted me after her third and final day of the bar exam: “Is it normal to feel like I failed the MBE???”
I let her know this was completely normal. Heck, I wanted to puke with anxiety after the third and final day of testing.
In a few months, the results will be released, and the abysmal data will become painstakingly real for a critical mass of you as test-takers. With societal expectations, as well as your own, some of you will treat the bar exam results as life or death. As Mel Brooks famously quipped, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
But it is important that you have some perspective. You’ve made it through the grueling process of law school. Now you have to jump through one more hoop to become an attorney. Since its inception, the bar has been through several iterations. So while some older lawyers may have no empathy for recent test takers, my position tends to be a little more nuanced.
Take Michigan’s Bar Exam, for example. In the last decade, if a test taker scored high enough on the MBE, the Michigan State Board of Law Examiners did not grade the essays. In other words, you could pass Michigan’s bar exam simply by doing well on the multiple-choice section.
Then sometime around 2010, the examiners started grading the essay portions as well, no matter how you did on the MBE. Then in 2012, without an explanation or reasonable notice, they re-weighted the exam to make essays count for 50 percent of the exam. Lo and behold, scores plummeted (and ATL was there to document the carnage). In 2014, the examiners re-weighted the essay portion yet again.
In those three years, the overall passage rate in Michigan precipitously dropped from 80 percent to 58 percent, a 22-point decline — from 80 percent in 2010, to 76 percent in 2011, to 58 percent in 2012. Did law students’ aptitude or LSAT scores plummet by that much in three years? No. Yet, the continuing narrative has been how much dumber law students have become. Clearly, the issue in falling test scores is much more nuanced.
When I beat myself up over missed questions in my post-bar mental state (which I don’t recommend by the way!), I often read about others who used their initial failure as a stepping stone, rather than a road block, from sources such as ATL, Buzzfeed, and The Wall Street Journal. The list is long and distinguished, and includes such famous names as John F. Kennedy Jr., Benjamin Cardozo, and FDR.
If you need more reading therapy to soothe you during your few months of purgatory, then you can seek refuge in the words of Rudyard Kipling:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run—
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man [or Woman], my son [or daughter]!
Finally, be sure to remember: worrying is like a rocking chair, sure it gives you something to do, but it never gets you anywhere. So do your best to put the bar exam in the back of your mind. Don’t beat yourself up over questions you could’ve answered better.
You have one last hoop to jump through to become a lawyer. Having to retake an exam isn’t the end of the world.
Now go back out in the world and enjoy civilization!
Renwei Chung is the Diversity Columnist at Above the Law. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.